This course is meant for students in engineering and other disciplines who seek a challenging, interactive, team-based, and hands-on learning experience in entrepreneurship and technology. In this highly experiential course, students work in simulated start-up teams to create products or start-up ideas to address a broadly-defined need of an industry partner or social challenge.

Technology is now manipulating us at a level that is unprecedented. Many problems have emerged with the rise of new media and technology, from effects on our individual mental health, manipulative product reviews, to social influence on individual beliefs. This course asks students to identify an underlying problem in different types of platforms — social networking, social audio platforms, disappearing stories, social live streaming, shoppable social platforms (finance, music, health and wellness, games, etc.), and business social media to create novel solutions that will help foster more meaningful experiences and prevent mass social level manipulation.Traditionally, customer discovery is taught to center on individual user experience. In this class, we are looking at the ways in which user experience can help us identify the problems, where participant behavior, culture, and complex systems of new media and platforms are the medium of solution design. In this experiential class, students are encouraged to explore and apply understanding about how we interact with media and technology on the psychological level. This class will ask students to build multi-disciplinary teams from all fields to collaborate and develop a new business from the ground-up by applying design thinking and other innovation frameworks to see through the wicked problems and come up with innovative solutions. How might we imagine a social network that appeals to our better natures than Facebook does today? How might we design a stock trading product like Robinhood that avoids mass purchase of worthless stock? Working in teams, students will invent novel solutions that leverage tech, prototype solutions, and explore customer value propositions, business models, and go-to-market strategy, all while gaining fluency in the behavioral and cultural principles that might shed insights on how these tools are applied for ethical innovation. Our class will culminate with a series of fast pitches to tech executives and investors to present the startups they worked on during the semester. More Information: https://scet.berkeley.edu/students/courses/challenge-labs/facebooked-clickbait-and-customer-manipulation/

This course counts towards the SCET Certificate in Technology and Entrepreneurship. Additional information: https://scet.berkeley.edu/certificate-in-entrepreneurship-and-technology/. Questions about SCET course enrollment or certificate can be directed to lee.2293@berkeley.edu.

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